Tag: municipal broadband

Australia Expands Fiber Internet Network Footprint

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By RACHEL PANNETT

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Read more about key players in Australia's upcoming elections.

CANBERRA—Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Friday unveiled an expanded footprint for a planned national high-speed fiber Internet network that will now reach 93% of homes and businesses, up from 90% previously.

The network is a defining policy for Gillard’s ruling center-left Labor government ahead of an Aug. 21 general election.

But the program isn’t universally loved, even though it is popular with many voters. Australia’s main conservative Liberal-National opposition coalition has questioned the need for such an expensive service and has threatened to scrap the plan if it returns to power.

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Editorial: Hungry for fiber

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By Daily Record Staff

Hunger seems to be driving the new chapter in the grassroots push to build a high-speed fiber-optic network in Baltimore. And that’s a good thing.

The hunger, says Litecast LLC’s Mark Wagner, is for “something more,” in this case a potentially valuable economic development tool that might also spark social change.

This all started, of course, with Google, the California search engine giant that said in February it would pick a test market to build an ultra-fast broadband network connecting anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 people to the Web.

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Vermont Is Wiring Itself With Fiber Because Nobody Else Will

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East Ventral Vermont Community Fiber Network moving forward…

06:24PM Thursday Jul 29 2010 by Karl Bode

Vermont already wasn’t exactly a great state for broadband, given the largely rural state is a ROI nightmare for large ISP bean counters. Their broadband fortunes were recently made substantially worse by Fairpoint Communications, who acquired Verizon‘s unwanted New England DSL network, then subsequently imploded under the not so watchful eye of Vermont regulators. Vermont’s been tired of waiting for uninterested ISPs to wire them so they’re working hard at wiring themselves.

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What lies beneath

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palm lined Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, near ...
Image via Wikipedia

Santa Monica is making their excess fiber work for them to drive economic development and put money back into their general fund.  They receive over $1 million in revenue per year just leasing dark fiber to a few institutions.  Imaging how much they could be earning with a community-wide infrastructure.

City’s dark fiber network attracts businesses

DOWNTOWN — Something runs underneath Santa Monica. Something dark. Something that reaches into City Hall, into schools, into hospitals, into office buildings.

But this dark something isn’t exactly menacing. In fact, it’s meant to help the city be technologically advanced and attract businesses to locate here.

City Hall has been leasing its dark fiber to local businesses for four years with the intention of attracting businesses to locate here in order to spur economic development. The revenue from the leasing has then gone toward providing free public wireless internet.

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Vt. broadband Internet access: Where is it?

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By DAVE GRAM
The Associated Press

Front view of the Vermont State House (taken S...
Image via Wikipedia

EAST MONTPELIER, Vt. — Marlene and Mike McCarty, real estate brokers who do much of their work at home less than four miles from the Vermont Statehouse, say they spend hundreds of dollars and hours each month on things they wouldn’t have to if they had broadband Internet access.

Despite promises for years by state officials and phone and cable companies that they would have broadband by 2010, they’re still waiting. Now Vermont is in the heat of a gubernatorial campaign, and the candidates are making a new round of promises about broadband and fixing Vermont’s spotty cellular phone coverage.

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Swiss Get FTTH

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What would be interesting to know is how St. Gallen funded the effort and whether they hope to break-even or make money.  Seven different service providers will certainly keep Swisscom on their toes.  It would also be interesting to know how much they are charging for dark-fiber or bandwidth.

ALTDORF, Switzerland — Early this year the town of St Gallen launched its new fibre-optic network. In March the public utility company switched on the first connections in the quarter Im Vogelherd. Thanks to Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), residents in around 1000 homes and many businesses now have faster, more extensive access to the internet, TV and telephony (Triple Play), and to many additional services offered by seven providers.

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Six months to act before NC looks at municipal broadband again

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By Allan Maurer

Communities United for BroadbandRALEIGH, NC – North Carolina legislators recently killed a proposed bill by state Senator David Hoyle (D-Gaston) that would have put a moratorium on municipal broadband efforts, but the issue is likely to arise again in January, say community activists in favor of continuing to allow cities to build their own broadband networks.

Hoyle’s bill, S1209 was just the most recent of four attempts backed by incumbent providers (AT&T, Time Warner Cable & others) to stop cities from creating their own broadband networks.

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